This post from Chris Dixon about the original paper for Bitcoin and the creator’s intentions got me thinking about intentions.

Companies, concepts and products rarely only grow larger; most change direction. Some people start trying to solve a problem one way and end up solving it in a different way. Some may solve a different problem completely. Sometimes, people find something they never expected in an area they weren’t looking and leave everything they started searching for.

These aren’t pivots where someone revisits their intentions; sometimes people head out in a direction, keep going and end up somewhere else doing something different than where they started.

Ideas, technologies and platforms reorganize our world and enable activities in ways and at scales inconceivable at their creation. Inventions and intentions are almost always only the starting point for larger discoveries - sometimes near, sometimes far, from their genesis.

By constraining bitcoin to its creator’s intentions we may miss its full potential as… who knows?